Linux

Poststructural Pub
1

Well my wife need a laptop for school, so before retiring it I burned an install CD of Debian’s Lenny and have been playing around seriously with it. Biggest step was to get the “Default Gateway 192.168.XXX.XXX” and “IP address” and the connection-specific “DNS Suffix”. The wireless card died, so it was all Ethernet cable.

Took me a while to figure out where everything is and how to download programs but after downloading nethack (a game) went on to find others quickly and downloaded acrobat and other plug-ins.

One thing I found odd is that you cannot stream Netflicks. I guess Microsoft’s Silverlight is what they use, and there is no way to use it in a Linux environment.

Next I’ll have to see how it works with my MP3 player, play some music and change the Desktop to something less resource intensive

Changed the desktop to xfce but it still seems to be to much for my taste. Didn’t know that there is no real way to run Flash, which makes it so many web pages hang up or don’t work properly.

Well now flash is up and running.

2

Have you tried VLC? I’ve used them in the past to run videos that were giving problems. They have a version of Ubuntu. I don’t know whether they do other flavours of Linux.

3

VLC looks interesting, I’ll check to see if it is already installed.

To my knowledge nothing runs the Silverlight media codecs other than the Microsoft software, and that is only on OSX and windows machines. Now that is the only thing that doesn’t run for media that I have that I know of. Moonlight is the Linux planned parallel project, but not usable yet.

I was able to get flash to work by downloading the Ubuntu .deb file from Adobe’s site. Hurray for forks.

4

Good to know your priorities are straight.

To my knowledge nothing runs the Silverlight media codecs other than the Microsoft software

I haven’t tried it yet, but Novell is working on it:
http://www.go-mono.com/moonlight/

5

Yep, I have checked out Moonlight, from their Wiki page.

Does Netflix work with Moonlight?

Netflix does not work with Moonlight at this time. While Moonlight supports all of the UI and media playback infrastructure, it > lacks DRM support > which Netflix requires. See this silverlight.net forum post and this page on the Moonlight wiki.

6

Netflix does not work with Moonlight at this time.

Aw, lame. I hate DRM.